Signorinella [English translation]

Pale Signorinella,

sweet neighbor on the fifth floor,

there is not a night that I don't dream of Naples

and that was twenty years ago.

It is snowing in my country,

the church steeple is white,

all the wood has turned to ash—

I am always cold and I am sad and tired.

My love, you don't remember

that, when saying goodbye,

you put a pansy in your buttonhole—

then your voice trembled as you said to me:

"Do not forget me".

Good times of revelry,

sweet happiness made out of nothing.

Raising glasses full of water

to toast our poor and innocent love.

In your eyes, there passed

a hope, a dream, and a caress.

You had an unforgettable name—

a name both long and short: Youth.

My darling,

in my old Latin textbook,

I found—guess!—a pansy.

Why did a tear glisten in my eye?

Who knows—who knows why?

In the meantime, far away,

while I listen to you, rings the bell

of the small church of the Gesù—

and it snows—see how it snows:

But you—where are you?